Between Pen and Paper: The Poetry of Habiba Muhammadi

by Shannon K. Winston

I write
To shout
To live
You write
To shout
To live
But who will silence
The shouting between us?

-Habiba Muhammadi, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi

Habiba Muhammadi was born in Algeria and attended the University of Algiers where she studied philosophy. She then moved to Egypt where she earned a degree in Arabic literature. Now a permanent resident in Cairo, she works as a journalist and contributes regularly to a variety of literary and cultural magazines (Handal, The Poetry of the Arab Word, 339).

As the poem that opens this article suggests, Muhammadi’s poetry reflects on her personal relationship to writing. She turns to writing as a space where she can be heard or, in her own words, where she can “live,” “write,” and “shout.” Simultaneously, she also broaches the larger question of collectivity: in the final lines of this poem, there is a pronoun shift from a singular “I” to an “us.” While the reader is not given any definitive answers as to who the “us” includes, what is clear is that there is strife that divides the “us” that should be united rather than divided. When taking the larger historical and political situation of Algeria into consideration, the “we” could refer to Algerians and the Algerian War of Independence and, at the same time, it could also include women who have struggled for so long to be recognized.

The page is the central image that pervades many of Habiba Muhammadi’s poems. Her speaker continually reminds the readers of the writing process as the poem unfolds on the page, which assumes several significances. For example, Muhammadi writes: “This paper is our friend/ It holds ever steadfast/Against the repeated stabbings/Of our pens.” Here, not only is paper a place of familiarity but also one that withstands violence—the violence against meaning, language, and the literal violence that a writer recounts over her lifetime, as well. In another poem, paper links the speaker to her past when she states: “In my room far away/ I write the memory of dead paper/In a barren space/Loneliness speaks words of love/to me..” (231). Far from encouraging the creative process, here, paper represents a dearth of words and possibilities for communication.

Overall, Muhammadi’s poetic style is pithy and clear. Many of her poems are treat very complicated themes within a few short lines of verse. In her preface to The Poetry of the Arab World, Nathalie Handal explains: “North African women throughout their history have been heroes and legends, martyrs and resistance fighters, nationalists, and writers, participating in all aspects of their civilization historically, politically, socially, and artistically” (Handal, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, 30). Muhammadi grapples with the past (and all that it entails for her as an Algerian woman living in Egypt) within the confines of the page.

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps Literary Progress Go Down

by: Mayra David

ANNA FELICIA SANCHEZ ISHIKAWA or Anna Ishikawa, as she is known professionally, was born in August 1981 and graduated from St. Scholastica’s Academy High School in 1998. She gained admittance to the top University of the nation – the University of the Philippines, Diliman – where she majored in Creative Writing, eventually earning her BA in English Studies. She has won numerous grants and local and national awards for her fiction and placed second for a full-length play in English in the 2004 Palanca Awards – which is regarded as the Philippines most prestigious and longest-running literary contest. Over the past few years, she also participated as a fellow for fiction in English in the UP, Dumaguete, and Iligan National Writers Workshops, some of the most selective in the country.

Some Americans who identify themselves strongly by their ethnic origins might wonder at the surname Sanchez (Anna’s maiden name). Many might assume this is because of her ancestry; the country was after all a Spanish colony for over three centuries. But in fact, a large majority of Filipino families have Spanish names without having Spanish ancestry. The quick answer to this is that during the colonial period, the Claveria Decree of 1849 required all Filipino families to select a Spanish surname name from an approved list. Ishikawa, of course, is a distinctively Japanese name and is the name she adopted from her husband who is Japanese-Filipino. With a name that practically contains the history of the world, is it any wonder that she writes in the universal language and for a universal audience?

Given that it is not even the official language of the United States, it might surprise some Americans to hear that in addition to Filipino, or Tagalog, English is the other official language of the Philippines; it is considered the (lingua franca) throughout most of the nation. Most Filipinos, particularly in the urban areas, are not only completely fluent in speaking it but some are even more comfortable writing in English than in their native tongue. It may even be that, as any students of a language are apt to be more attentive to grammar than its native speakers, Filipino writers who write in English are likely to write more correct, albeit sometimes more self-conscious, prose than the average native English speaking pupil. Certainly it is also conceivable to posit that the Philippines, and perhaps other postcolonial nations as well, is done being a student of English as foreign language. That is, they no longer consider it “foreign” but rather the operating language of the international community, as well as a natural second tongue, beyond it being officially so. We maybe entering the era of global cultural homogenization. If so, what does that mean for the future of Filipino literature?

The Philippines is often viewed as a matriarchal society, perhaps due to the fact that in the past two decades, two of the three presidents have been women, including the two-term incumbent. Though not strictly speaking a matriarchal society, the cultural history of the country does demonstrate a balance in political and cultural contributions from both genders. In the literary history of the country, there is no prominent history, at least no significant movements, to promote female writers over males writers. Perhaps, this is because of their common struggle to promote any sort of literary endeavors by Filipinos that the gender issue had to be relegated to a secondary position. At least for now.

A filipino writer might get mired in a state of limbo if she were to endlessly ponder who she is, or should be, as a writer. Anna Ishikawa and her contemporaries know there is more pressing work at hand: Get the nation to start reading again in the first place. At a close second place is to get the country to produce more written work - any language will do.

According to a survey sponsored by the National Book Development Board (NBDB) the number one book most read in the Philippines today is the Bible. The second genre of books read are romances. What is a young literary writer – scion of the nation’s literati - to do? A smart person and accomplished writer in tune with all trends of the industry, would supply the demand. And Anna is nothing if not a smart and accomplished writer. Publish or perish, as they say. Anna’s first book ODD GIRL OUT is a romance novel. Unapologetically ‘chick lit’ as a matter of fact. The story, simple and auspicious enough, is about a modern Filipino woman trying to find out what kind of love she is looking for, after her perfect one fell apart.

As Anna told the Manila Bulletin upon the book’s release, “It’s the theme of despair, escape, recovery and redemption.” The story could be boiled down to those broad themes, but the book itself, represents more than that. Her heroine, Cerisse, is a very independent young woman with a very “modern” lifestyle: living on her own, starting her business and being sexually very active.
Anna continues: “It also explores female sexuality as popularized by the likes of Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’ Diary, and the realities and stereotypes of the modern woman… you also have elements like the gay friend and issues of being a single mom.”

This may seem like nothing new to readers of the genre but even for a fictional Filipino life, it is quite controversial considering that the Philippines is a staunchly conservative society with over 81% of the population belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. The president, a devout catholic woman, once “admitted” to using the contraceptive pill as a young mother, but said it made her feel so guilty she had to go to confession. She has announced her intentions to withhold public funding for contraceptive programs, pushing for natural birth control (i.e. abstinence) which is the only method sanctioned by the church. Issues of homosexuality, pre-marital or promiscuous sex are clearly not issues open to discourse.

The dichotomy between modern Filipino mores and the peoples’ inextricable symbiosis with the United States is most evident in the contemporary literature the country has been producing in recent decades.

To say there is an exilic nature to the English writing by Filipinos – insofar as that distinction can still be drawn between what is deemed “Filipino” and “Filipino in English” writing – is a subjective matter. However, what many of the nation’s most prominent writers agree on – and often promulgate in their work – is the notion that Filipino writers are caught between two languages and two cultures. As renowned Filipino writer Nick Joaquin has declared, “the identity of a Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.”

And in his book Authentic Though Not Exotic: Essays on Filipino Identity, Dr. Fernando N. Zialcita, suggests that “many Filipinos question the “authenticity” of their identity. They are uneasy about the heavy Spanish influence that came in with colonialism. They wonder if their culture is but a mixture of conflicting traditions. Moreover, they fear that the Hispanic presence seems an oddity in a Southeast Asia that defines itself as non-Western.”

Oddity or not, the Filipino experience on display in its literary works, is certainly unique in the South Asian region. When Anna Ishikawa references shows like Sex and the City, or has characters that demonstrate an affinity to the lifestyle depicted in such shows (controversial even by western standards), is she representing the modern filipino woman? Or urging her to be more liberated, to own her sexuality? Her main characters are pointedly atypical Filipinos from the main character who lives alone in her condo, to the single mother supported by a family of friends instead of actual kin. Is this lifestyle a trend in the younger generations? No, not really. She is providing escapism and at the same time exploring these themes as a writer even as the entire country is exploring them as a society. Perhaps the fact that such novels serve as a vehicle for escapism is most indicative of the existing social polarity.

Imagine this: You have always wanted to be writer and have been writing stories since time in memoriam; Short stories, poems, and plays. Maybe you even have a comic strip with your very own made up super hero that you continuously develop for the fun of it. You do very well in school (bookish ones always do) Among your favorite books you count Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Jane Eyre by Bronte, as well as books by Nick Hornby and Terry Pratchett. You gain acceptance to the nation’s most prestigious University where you join ranks with other literary scions of the country. And what do you major in but English Studies and creative writing, of course. You publish your first three books before the age of twenty-seven; even greater things still ahead.

All these things are true for Anna Ishikawa. But in terms of livelihood and prestige, what does it mean for her? Especially when for decades bookstores have been flooded with American and European publications, From TigerBeat magazine to the latest by James Patterson.

Fox Literary House was founded by Anna’s former university classmates. They have just published her third book “Where Your Dreams Come True” about a young woman who sees the man of her dreams in, well, her dreams, and starts looking for him in real life.

Sarah Grutas, a friend of Anna’s and editor of Fox books, seems to feel it’s time to move ‘Filipiniana’ out of its niche and squeeze it in next to the Sweet Valley High books on the store shelves. The most direct way to do this, is to offer Filipino stories in the same vein, same language, as the competition. The lack of language barrier has made this possible and necessary. Especially when your young Filipino writers grew up reading and being educated on Dostoevsky and Austen.

As editor, Sarah says her main goal for Fox Literary House is to heighten the Filipino people’s level of awareness of great literature. “Yes, we want to earn money. Yes, we want to provide entertainment. But the most important thing for us is for the Filipino people to have something that will stimulate their creativity and [sense of] cultural excellence.”

Another goal, apparently, is to cheat. “With our own horror anthology which are very popular in the country, our writers tried to incorporate issues that are not usually addressed, like homosexuality. How do you write a story about a gay ghost? Most of the stories are about homosexuality, prostitution, militarization, and domestic violence – issues that abound in the country but people keep quiet about….not many Filipino readers care about these things anymore. They’d rather watch Pinoy Big Brother or a telenovela or something they won’t have to process.”

Not many publishers in the Philippines offer advances or give royalties. Fox books does both. If a publishing house does offer any monetary compensation, the highest incentive pay a writer will get is Fifteen thousand pesos ( about 356 US dollars). Fox Literary House is one of the only two publishers in the country that will offer that fifteen thousand pesos to writers. Houses that do pay will, at most, give “known” authors eight thousand pesos. New writers can settle for compensations in the three to five thousand peso range. Actually, some larger companies do not give any monetary compensation for any written work. She explains that oftentimes, the only incentive larger companies will offer is the “prestige of being published by a big-time publisher.”

Fox Books also has three options on copyright ownership for writers to choose from: in perpetuity and five or ten year options – they do not claim copyright ownership on the book as an idea or concept only on the book as Object. Sarah says they are the only publisher in the Philippines who has this kind of “copyright-ownership-(ewan).”
It isn’t the competition, then, that has pushed Fox Literary House to offer writers like Anna such a liberal “copyright-ownership-thingy”. What they are doing is creating a platform for expression in written works. They are bringing more Filipinos to writing and are promoting the arts as a profession, and not just an extracurricular activity. Almost unheard of in large publishing markets abroad, Fox books accepts unsolicited manuscripts. In fact, they have an open submission policy and advertise for manuscripts on the internet.

Revolution by chick lit? Probably not. Still, one can at least hope for a little social discourse. After all, the Philippines is a nation whose national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal, was a writer. His written works – the novels Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) and El Filibusterismo (The Subversive) – have been credited with igniting the revolution against the Spanish empire which ruled over the Filipino people for over 333 years. True, the legacy of the colonial period is not only manifested in politics and language but in literature as well. Writings on the subject of the trauma due to imperialism has brought us illustrious works by the likes of J.M Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Should it then follow that the trauma be accompanied by obligations for Filipino writers – or any other writer who originates from a former colony or commonwealth nation – to explore the weath of “material” available to them due to colonization?

Anna and her colleagues do not presume this task is incumbent upon them. Of course, as the literary progeny of internationally recognized literary luminaries such as Lualhati Bautista, Nick Joaquin and Ninotchka Rosca, they balance the future of the nation’s literature on the tip of their pens.

But the task they are taking on is the promotion and development of a fledgling market: Filipino literature for the global masses. Having been weaned on western literature and tastes, who can be better entrusted to poise Filipino writers – particularly since they are already free of any linguistic encumbrances – for the international market? Their works donot seek recognition, but universality and establishment. The past is precious, but the future is at risk. Much in the same way national bookstores and overseas markets do not discriminate in the literature they import into the country, it seems the philosophy of the new generation of nationalistic Filipino writers is to produce work that transcends their regionality.

Women and the Hijab or Why Is That Man Shouting at Me?

by Grace Andreacchi

It was not without some trepidation that I set out on my first ever journey to the Middle East this winter. I’d be visiting Istanbul first, with my husband, and then we’d be undertaking an extensive tour of Syria with our two sons, one of whom has been perfecting his Arabic during a year at the University of Damascus. Due to unforeseen difficulties in obtaining a visa for Syria, I’d be on my own in Istanbul for several days.

Americans are not exactly flavour-of-the-month at the moment in the Islamic world, albeit with extremely good reason, but my own personal beliefs regarding war and peace wouldn’t necessarily shield me from the hostility aimed at the government of the country of my birth. And then there’s the whole issue of the Hijab. To cover or not to cover – that is the question. For many western women I suppose the answer would be self-evident – not to cover. To cover is to submit to oppression, to deny one’s fundamental freedom and equality with men, to betray one’s sisters, longing for the right to feel the wind in their hair. But I wasn’t sure it was all that simple. On the practical level, I wished to benefit from my time in new and fascinating places without the distraction of unwanted attention. A bit of research on travel forums yielded the following highly interesting results: Among western travellers, the men reported back (for both Damascus and Istanbul) no special dress was necessary for women, as plenty of local women wore western dress. But, and here’s where it gets interesting, the women travellers universally recommended that you cover, cover, cover. Long sleeves, long skirts, and yes – a headscarf were advisable ‘if you don’t want to be harassed’. And who does? So, as a matter of sheer practicality, I decided in favour of the Hijab, and also equipped myself with a couple of jilbab, or loose-fitting ankle length dresses from the Whitechapel market, London’s place for all things Asian. These were not ‘bin bags’ but quite attractive and comfortable gowns, not unlike a beach cover-up, that you simply slip over your clothes. I wasn’t sure whether I’d need them, but I liked the idea of having them, just in case.

In the event, I did wear the Hijab, and the jilbab as well, and the experience was an enlightening one in many ways. I did not find it ‘oppressive’, but liberating, and , in some ways, quite seductive. Dressed in this manner I became, in the eyes of my hosts, something I am, namely a respectable woman who is not interested in sex with strangers. Dressed in my ordinary clothes, which are, I can assure you, in no way outrageous by the standards of twenty-first century London, I would’ve been a whore on the make. I was treated with respect and even courtly deference by the men, and with sisterly solidarity by the women everywhere I went. Did they take me for a Muslima? Probably. Was this dishonest on my part? I hope not. The message I wished to give, which was wholly honest and true, was simply this – I am a decent woman.

What is a decent woman? How do we know one when we see one? However far we may have wandered from such Christian ideals as chastity and modesty in the west, the idea of respectability or decency still has some meaning. Dress is a means by which we give out information about ourselves to the world, and the code is different in every society. When you change cultures, you risk giving out the wrong signals about yourself. Add to this the generally low opinion of western women in the Muslim world, and you can see that such misunderstandings are practically inevitable. It’s true that many women, in both Istanbul and Damascus, don’t wear the Hijab, although far more do. Do these women suffer harassment? I’ve no idea, but I suspect to some extent they do, although not nearly to the same degree that a foreign woman, and especially a foreign woman travelling alone, would do. It’s also safe to assume that local women are familiar with nuances of dress that are beyond the visitor’s ken. Exactly which types of western dress are appropriate and when and where – it can get pretty complicated. The unwritten rules are always the hardest to learn and the easiest to break.

But above and beyond the practical side of the matter, I’m a bit puzzled by the glib assumption in the west that the Hijab is an instrument of oppression. I felt no compunction about wearing it – ‘It’s only a scarf!’ I said to my husband, to my sons, as they looked on, baffled and bemused. We seem to have forgotten that, as little as fifty years ago in our own culture, no respectable person, man or woman, was seen in the street without a hat. It was not unusual for women to veil themselves in the west, particularly women of high caste, or women in mourning, or, significantly, women travellers. A last vestige of this practice can still be seen in the persistence of the bridal veil, nowadays often worn as the bizarrely incongruous accessory to a dress that leaves the bride’s shoulders and bosom bare. In the last fifty years our dress code has changed so radically that it’s difficult to tell, on a Saturday night in London, who are the streetwalkers and who the innocent suburban girls in town for a night of fun. Only the deadness in their eyes gives it away, their clothes certainly don’t.

Now as a prelude to my journey I did more than check a few travel forums. I read the Qur’an, and read it carefully and seriously, and what I found there surprised me very much. I found nothing that oppressed or demeaned women, or relegated them to second status. I found much that was beautiful, respectful, and admirable. The Hijab, or act of covering, is described as obedience to God [S33:36], as modesty (to protect women from molestation) [S33:59], as purity of heart for both men and women [S33:53], as Shield: ‘Allah, Most High, is Heaven, is Ha’yeii (Bashful), Sit’teer (Shielder). He loves Haya’ (Bashfulness) and Sitr (Shielding; Covering).’ The Hijab is righteousness, the Hijab is belief, it is the natural ‘bashfulness’ of women, and the ‘gheerah’ or natural dignity of the woman who does not wish to excite sexual interest inappropriately. These are beautiful virtues that take us very far from the mores of the secular west. However, they intersect closely with those of an earlier Christian tradition, which, while practically abandoned in Europe, still has some currency in the United States. St. Paul tells us: ‘In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array. But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.’ [1Timothy, 2, 9-10] Well, it’s hard to argue with good works, and handsome is as handsome does is an old but sound adage. St. Paul does spoil things a bit by going on to admonish us to ‘learn silence with all subjection’, and then to bring up that old business about Eve and the serpent, a convenient stick always. Still, why I’ve no intention of keeping silent so long as I’ve got something useful to say, I do rather suspect we’ve thrown the baby out with the proverbial bathwater on this one, that traditionally gender-specific virtues such as modesty and chastity have gone largely missing in our brave new world, and we are the poorer for that. There is an argument to be made that a woman has a right to her honour and dignity, to the beauty of her person as a private and sacred thing, to her sexuality and power over men as something serious to be taken seriously and used wisely in the service of God, not bartered in the marketplace. I’ve not space here to make the argument at length, but I’d ask the reader to entertain the possibility that such virtues, which have existed in most cultures and at most times, may not be intrinsically oppressive but rather enlightened and enlightening.

Whether you agree with any of this or not, you can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is about a piece of cloth on a woman’s head. Why does it matter so much to so many people? Isn’t it a woman’s own business what she chooses to wear? Why is it always men kicking up a fuss about what we have or haven’t got on, and never, ever the other way round? In Turkey women are not permitted to enter public buildings if they’re wearing a headscarf (a policy currently under review). This cuts off the education of all those girls who choose to wear one, and make no mistake, many do choose to do so, sometimes for the reasons outlined above, sometimes for other reasons which may include an identification with political Islam, an adherence to a tradition with which they are comfortable, and no doubt many others, as subtle and manifold as the complexities of the human heart and the individual’s intersection with society. In France too, the doctrine of so-called laïcitéhas been interpreted to mean that girls and women are not to wear the Hijab in public buildings, including schools. All this can seem manifestly unfair to one brought up in the American tradition of ‘freedom of religion’, where the Amish children attend school in the quaint garb of yesteryear without raising a murmur. Meanwhile, women from the streets of Iran to the classrooms of Anatolia to the bainlieue of Paris and the airport queues of London are fighting for the right to wear the Hijab or the right to take the damn thing off.

At the heart of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow lies the dilemma of the Hijab. The plot centres around a writer who has come to a remote town to investigate reports of numerous suicides among the so-called ‘headscarf girls’, high-school girls who are killing themselves under pressure from the authorities to remove their headscarves. He puts the following speech into the mouth of one such girl. ‘If a lot of girls in our situation are thinking about suicide, you could say it has to do with wanting to control our own bodies. That’s what suicide offers girls who’ve been duped into giving up their virginity, and it’s the same for virgins who are married off to men they don’t want. For girls like that, a suicide wish is a wish for innocence and purity.’ (trans. Maureen Freely). Now, there are real problems for women living in Islamic cultures, there are evil traditions of oppression and domination, false and murderous notions of honour, a whole catalogue of horrors, sometimes justified, however unjustifiably, in the name of religion. But I don’t think we can just ignore the voice of that girl. We ought to listen, and try to understand what she is telling us. Salma Yaqoob, a British-born Muslim and political activist, has spoken eloquently of the ‘woman’s right to choose’. She sees the banning of the Hijab, rightly, as racism and xenophobia in the west, and insists that both banning and enforcement are equally oppressive, as both deprive a woman of the right to choose for herself what she will wear. [Salma Yaqoob,‘Women and the Hijab’, speech to the European Social Forum, 16 October 2004] If you doubt the racism and xenophobia, just try a little experiment - put on a headscarf and go for a walk in London. I sometimes wear one, just to keep my hair dry – it rains a lot in London, not generally a steady downpour but more of a persistent drizzle that soaks gradually into your clothes and hair, and a headscarf makes sense. The Queen often wears one, for example. And more than once I’ve had strange men shout insults at me such as ‘Go back where you came from!’ or ‘OOOOHH I can see your HAIR!’ and so on. There you are, men shouting at you again. In one part of the world they shout at you because you’re not wearing a headscarf and in another part of the world they shout at you because you are. Can’t win.

I spent a few days in Istanbul and a couple of weeks travelling in Syria – this hardly makes me an expert. But I discovered something by wearing the Hijab than I could not have discovered in any other way. When I had it on, I was exactly the same person as I was when I didn’t have it on. I was just as intelligent, just as curious, just as funny, just as observant, just as critical, just as everything, just the same! I see women in Hijab differently now. I’ve tumbled to their secret. They’re just like the rest of us.

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years - sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra, and the play Vegetable Medley (New York and Boston). Stories and poetry appear in both on-line and print journals.Her work can be viewed at http://graceandreacchi.com.

Mara Zalite (1952 - )

by Zinta Aistars

Words splash at my feet,
the voice of my blood talks, whispers and
fills the chambers.
Glittering river.
Here, I am.
~ from the poem, “Language,” by M. Zalite

What we are denied, we often learn to treasure most. Of those basics that a human being needs to live life well, surely language—the ability to communicate freely—is one of the building blocks upon which nearly all else in civilized life is built. Language is our means of self-expression but also our vehicle of connection with the rest of humanity.

Mara Zalite (zah-lee-teh) is a child of the Soviet Union, born in 1952, in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, but returning to Latvia with her family at age four to grow up in the then Soviet-occupied Baltic nation. Among the many losses of freedom in Latvia at that time was the loss of free speech. Indeed, even just the use of the Latvian language was discouraged, if not made into a punishable offense, substituting instead the language of “Mother Russia.” And still, Latvian literature flourished, as various art forms often do in suppressed areas. Art has always proven to be a survival mechanism, if not a tool for revolution. Language, the word that is more powerful than even the sword, carries great energy and life force, and no one understood this better than those standing at the Soviet helm. Zalite, having lived in a time when language was denied as well as in a time when language in all its varied facets flourishes again, has a strong appreciation for her native tongue that emerges repeatedly in her various literary art forms. It is the voice of her blood, she writes, it is her identity. It is, one senses, the carrier of her personal battle cry.

Zalite writes in varied genres and forms: poetry, prose (essays), drama, lyrics, even rock opera. In whatever genre, Latvian folklore has a consistent presence in her work, not only tying her to the roots of Latvian language, but also to Latvian history—the identity of her people. Toward the final years of Soviet occupation in her country, she was known to weave protest into her work in a cry for Latvian independence—which indeed came to fruition in 1991, as the Soviet Union fell at last. Her play, “Pilna Maras istabina,” or “Full Mara’s Room,” staged in 1983, was her groundbreaking work that won her the attention from critics, readers and viewers, that would push her literary career forward. This and many other Zalite’s works have central female figures, adding a second and parallel voice for women’s independence in an independent country. The play addresses the masculine energy which has brutalized the earth and its nations, and renews a cry for the return of the feminine energy, the ancient Mother (earth and nature), mother of all mothers, to take her place again.

Zalite has also published many books of poetry, collections of essays, song lyrics and scripts for musicals. Her work has been translated into German, Russian, English, Estonian, Swedish, and other languages, yet as one who has the privilege and pleasure of reading her work in its original Latvian, to my ear and sensibilities, her work sings best on its own instrument.

One of Zalite’s better known essays, appearing in “Unfinished Thoughts,” is titled “The Cross and the Sword.” In it, she brings up some of those themes and concepts that those who have been long oppressed hold perhaps in higher esteem than those who have long known only freedom. Not only a deeper appreciation of one’s own native language, but the soil that nourishes it—one’s own free land. Delving into ancient Latvian history, dating back to the 13th century, when Latvia was known as Livonia (an area that today also covers parts of Estonia), Zalite traces the appearance of various symbols and their ties to the masculine and feminine in what we think of today as Latvian folklore. In the feminine group falls the concept of homeland. The masculine centers on power and aggression, expanding borders and too often expressing itself in battle and rape and a violence of power over another, but she recalls, too, the nurturing of the mother figure, and what greater mother than one’s land, or homeland. Zalite’s appreciation for her own rediscovered culture is poignant, but as modern times of a shrinking globe urge, she also considers Mother Earth, and that we must show gratitude and care for the mother that has birthed us all. In this mix of escalating mothers, from one’s own corner of the earth, to the earth itself, Zalite urges an appreciation for the diverse cultures of every homeland, for a greater array of self-expression is a wealth to be preserved and cherished. To be a global citizen is not to forget or abandon one’s homeland, but to bring it, rich and full with its unique tapestry of people, to the global arena. More perspectives, more solutions; more diversity, more treasure, benefiting all.

Zalite’s unique voice, its mix of the ancient and the contemporary; the oppressed and the free; the feminine in balance with the masculine; brings the Latvian literary tradition to the global doorstep in a way that perhaps few others can who have not traveled her unique path in life.

A graduate of the University of Latvia, the country’s most prestigious institute of higher education, with a degree in philology, Zalite has worked on various editorial boards and in the Writers’ Union of Latvia. She has been the managing editor of one of the country’s most esteemed literary periodicals, “Karogs,” or “Banner.” She is the president of the Latvian Authors’ Association.

Aspazija (1868 – 1943)

by Zinta Aistars

Several Latvian women writers stand out as offering insight into the earliest seeds of feminism—Latvian style, if you will—or, simply, what it meant, and means, to be a woman with a voice. Few, if any, are better known than Aspazija.

It was only in the latter part of the 19th century that Latvian literature found its own riverbed, and as if a dam had opened, a literary culture was fast taking its developmental course, pouring forth with a rush of new literary voices. Prior to this time, although the Latvian language and culture are among the oldest in existence today, the tiny Baltic country was under the heel of one occupying power after another. During that span of centuries, Latvians were not allowed to pursue an education and were forced to live as peasants and serfs, often coming to identify themselves culturally with the current ruler. Nearing the end of the 19th century, that ruling power would have been the German influence, and it wasn’t until a revolution of national identity took place that Latvians finally began to take some pride in being who they were—Latvians.

Aspazija’s voice entered the flow of new Latvian literature during that time, still a girl in high school when she began to write with a more serious intent (her first efforts at poetry was a collection written at age 14 in the German language). Until then, she had been Elza Rozenberga, but now she took a pen name, adopted from the Hammerling novel, “Aspasia.” The character of Aspasia was a woman of strength and beauty, and young Aspazija set her as a role model, adopting her name as her own. Critical acclaim soon followed, along with an invitation to work in Latvian theater in the capital city of Riga. Aspazija’s talent was recognized in drama, journalism, and as a literary critic.

Her beauty, meanwhile, caught the eye of another, equally fast rising Latvian literary star: Rainis. Not without recognition for the young woman’s literary prowess. The two were married in 1897 (Aspazija’s second marriage, as her first lasted but a short while and seemed mostly fodder for plays she wrote about a woman’s right to live according to her personal sense of life, following her own heart), and Aspazija and Rainis (pen name for Janis Plieksans) became a literary force to be reckoned with on an individual basis as well as a team. Aspazija was widely seen, and not just by Rainis, as being his muse, and the young editor of a Riga newspaper gained fame as a poet and playwright as well as a political influence. In the minds of many Latvians, even today, it is difficult to separate the two. One inspired the other, one’s works were often translated into other languages by the other, and it seems reasonable to imagine, each was the other’s irreplaceable “second pair of editorial eyes.” It is doubtful either would have achieved the level of literary acclaim or even political influence they enjoyed in Latvian society without the support of the other.

Yet to enjoy a strong and mutually satisfying relationship does not detract from a feminist voice. The couple was exiled to Russia and later to Switzerland, but were allowed to return to Latvia when the country regained its independence following World War I. Back in her own land, Aspazija continued to write in a feminist voice, becoming active in the Latvian feminist movement. A strain of rebellion, even when sometimes good-natured and humorous, threaded through many of her works, and her plays, “Simple Rights” and “Unattained Goals,” protested a society ruled by men. Her poetry often tended toward more romantic themes.

Aspazija was a member of the Parliament of Latvia from 1920 to 1934 as a representative of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Her contribution in Latvia’s government was her continued strong voice for women’s rights.

A book was later published of collected correspondence between Aspazija and Rainis, titled “Life and Art: A Correspondence,” and in it Aspazija wrote:

“With my deep love for my entire nation, I offer the entirety of two people’s lives, regardless of any protests, or threats, into the hands of our nation, so that it may, as a loving mother her children, who have suffered greatly, sometimes losing their way, punish or caress us—such will be our spiritual legacy.”

Astride Ivaska (1926-)

by Zinta Aistars

As with most of us, and, I suspect, in most any language, my first introduction to Latvian poetry was metered and rhymed, tightly reined in, an orderly clomping and marching of verses that moved like soldiers across the page. In Latvian school, which we children of the émigré community attended on Saturdays while our enviable American peers watched cartoons on television, or played ball in the park, or simply slept in, we instead learned to recite classic Latvian poetry. Our teachers drilled the metered lines into our brains, ta-TUM-ta-tum, ta-TUM-ta-da-dum, and we would memorize sometimes pages of these lyrical poems. It was a practice not only in learning literary form, but in rote memorization, and not the least in self-discipline. Many of the poems were testament to the war experience, with lines about the blood spilled in war, the love of one’s country, and the sacrifice made for freedom which we had nonetheless lost.

In those dusky rooms of the school on Saturday mornings, none of us felt particularly free. Super heroes in animated form with capes sweeping the breeze behind them on a television screen seemed much more enticing. But we memorized, and we discussed, and we recited. Poem after poem after poem.

Years later, I had a delayed appreciation for that kind of literary discipline. It was, after all, a world of super heroes. Only the heroes in those poems that spoke of the experience of loving one’s home and losing it, or dying for it, did not bounce back up from the ground for the next cartoon installment. Theirs was the mortal blood that nourished the soil to grow new seed and new life for future generations.

Some of that life took hold outside of Soviet-occupied Latvia. While we children of refugees were learning the old classics, a new generation of poetry was taking shape. It, too, spoke of the love of country, of freedom, and the hunger to survive. Such was the poetry of Astride Hartmane Ivaska, born in the capital city of Riga in 1926, a young woman when the Soviet army marched across the Latvian border. She was of the same generation as my parents and her experience was similar. When I had reached the age that she had been during World War II, I discovered Ivaska’s poetry, and it was nothing like what I had learned in school … and yet it was.

I received a book of Ivaska’s poetry as a gift, and I paged through it with growing wonderment. This was no army of words. There was no orderly marching here. These words danced and swam across the page, they whispered, they sang, they hummed, they wept. A line might stand alone, like a lost muse, only to recover itself in a droplet of syllables further down the page. Sometimes they rhymed, but mostly these words echoed and played off each other. And while this poet, too, wrote of heroes, and blood that was shed, and the ache of losing one’s childhood home to wonder if one would ever be allowed to see it again… it was in a manner that spoke more directly to my own heart. This was the poetry of exile. It contained the longing of a life thrown upon an unknown shore, even as it spoke of new love found, and renewed joy in living.

No pelniem
un no izdedziem
lidz dziesmai
esam celusies.
Un tomer dziedot
pelnu garsa
mute neizzud
ne mums, ne tiem,

kas saklausa mus taluma.

*
From the ashes
and from the burnt debris
to song
we have risen.
The taste of ashes
does not leave the mouth
not for us, nor for them

who listen to us from a distance.

(From “Memais laiks,” Gaisma Ievainoja by Astride Ivaska, Daugava, 1982)

I was struck, as one is, who falls in love at first read. In reading whatever I could find about Ivaska, I learned that she had lost her father during the war. He had been a general in the Latvian army during WWII, and no more had been heard from or about him after he had been captured by the Soviets. (In later years, I learned Ivaska had learned of her father’s fate only after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Latvia regained her freedom. He had been taken to Moscow in 1941, where he was executed.)

Ivaska wrote often about her father, and her connection with him, what she referred to as her “only mirror” in an essay of her memories, now a broken mirror. He had a kind of mythic form to her, as most fathers do to their daughters. She recalls his quiet strength, and he seems to take on the stance of all lost Latvian soldiers: a man who fights perhaps a hopeless battle, yet with utmost courage and devotion to the cause of what is right. He is a soldier in an army that is the David against the Goliath of the Red Army. Only this battle is not to be won.

As most Latvian refugees, Ivaska (then Hartmane) escaped to camps for “displaced persons” in Germany, where they awaited visas to whatever free land would take them. As did most of her peers, she continued her disrupted education in Germany, while she waited, studying languages. In 1949, she married Estonian poet, Ivar Ivask, and later that year immigrated to the United States, first to Minnesota, then taking up residence in Norman, Oklahoma in 1967, where she taught Russian, German and French at the University of Oklahoma. Ivaska remained there until the death of her husband, then answered an old call to cross the ocean once again to live in Europe—for a time in Ireland, then returning again to the place of her birth, Riga, Latvia, where she lives today.

And wherever this poet went, I followed her steps through her poetry and her poetic prose. That first book I had read of her work, Solis Silos (“A Step in the Woods,” 1973), was a step that had led me to try my own hand at Latvian poetry. Shortly after, I had the privilege of meeting Ivaska at a workshop for writing Latvian poetry, and when, by end of seminar, I shyly handed her some of my work, she astounded me by taking me, then the ripe age of 17, seriously. The workshop was over, but Ivaska took my manuscript home with her to Oklahoma, sending it back to me a few weeks later with careful and honest notes in the margins. Discard this, rework that, and the golden glimmer on a page here and there of praise. The note with the manuscript encouraged me to submit my manuscript to a Latvian publisher called Celinieks in Ann Arbor, Michigan—with her recommendation. My first book of Latvian poetry, Mala Kausa (“In an Earthen Mug”) was accepted for publication when I was 19 years old. My lifelong love affair with poetry, in any language, took root in those days, and I have Ivaska to thank.

Defining Women: Empowerment and Change in America

by Shana Thornton Morris

Poetry capable of inspiring change not only communicates the slick and tender pulse of a surface wound, it connects to the universal nerve of tremors and feelings, connecting wires, vessels, and shifting cells. Poets are transmitters of the human condition. They initiate and inspire change to transcend their time, their poems added to anthologies and their lines recited by literary scholars and avid readers. Some poets are popular during their lifetimes, like Phoebe and Alice Cary, while others like Emily Dickinson guarded a hidden, folded genius, breathing a quiet verse that grew in universal popularity helping to establish the root of American poetry after her death.

Women like Phillis Wheatley laboriously claimed a place for women’s poetry. Even if their voices only contained a partial truth of their own experiences, as Alice Walker points out in the essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” from her 1984 book with the same title, Walker further shows us that Wheatley represented a learned kitsch that “had held Phillis up to ridicule for more than a century.” A slave in the 18th-century, Phillis Wheatley absorbed language and ironed the statuesque ideal of liberty into her poetry. Her popularity led to her eventual freedom, though she remained sick and poor until the end of her short life. The New York Public Library’s digital Schomburg website reminds us that “Phillis Wheatley became the first African living in the British colonies to have a book published, and the second American woman to have a book of verse published.” Instead of creating an imaginative and prolific change in poetry, Wheatley’s achievements concern the poetic rite of passage that she represents. As Alice Walker writes in her essay, “It is not so much what you (Phillis Wheatley) sang, as that you kept alive, in so many of our ancestors, the notion of song.”

Emily Dickinson, the “Belle of Amherst,” wrote poetry, much of which remained private until her death, during the mid-19th century. Regarded by many as the co-inventor of American poetry¹, Dickinson invested her poetry with metaphysics and a “liquor never brewed” that ferments in the creative imagination. This sentiment and sensibility of Dickinson’s poetry influenced the forthcoming poets of the American literary canon, including William Carlos Williams.² While Dickinson did not initiate or stimulate social change and/or a transformation of poetic form within her lifetime, she communicates the mind’s timeless discovery of wild, divine depths and the mischievous, transcendental verses between human nature and Nature. In the century following Dickinson’s life, her poetic dashes and emphasis through capitalization did agitate the poetic form(lessness). For these reasons and more, 20th-century American writers, scholars, teachers, and students ingested Dickinson’s fascicles with an insatiable appetite.

But popular poetry often did inspire social change in 19th-century America. Abolitionist poetry became popular in the foreshadowing turmoil of Civil War. Best known for her involvement in the women’s suffrage movement, Phoebe Cary captures 19th-century humor concerning the socially accepted notion that unmarried women have a bleak and tragic place within the social hierarchy. However, the reader can sense a serious tone behind the veil of humor that reveals how Cary and other 19th-century women tried to slant the biased perspective that women needed a husband in order to fully experience life. The narrator of Cary’s poems “Shakesperian Readings”, “When Lovely Woman,” and “Lovers” mocks the culturally-prescribed, stereotypical social roles expressed in male-based formal literature.

The exceptionally popular abolitionist, suffragist, and African American poet Frances E. W. Harper (often called “the Bronze Muse”) read her poems during anti-slavery lectures. Harper composes a serious verse that represents the dichotomy of darkness and light, of innocence and war, of past and present. The short rhythm of “Bury Me in a Free Land” allowed people to remember the recitation of freedom’s voice. Frances Harper connects to the global suffrage movement in her poem “Ethiopia” during which the country metaphorically becomes a woman who yanks “(t)he tyrant’s yoke from off her neck” and symbolically frees herself to speak (line 5). Frances Harper gives voice to a universal hope for a future “freed from chains” where “laughing children play” (9, 1).

Written on November 22, 1873, another abolitionist and poet Rose Terry Cooke reminds women to wear “shoes of swiftness” concerning the Suffrage movement in the poem “Justice”.
A prolific and widely-read author, Cooke published poetry and short stories in Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and Scribner’s Monthly. She is a contemporary voice for women in the Suffrage Movement. In “Justice”, written during the Reconstruction years, she reminds women to set their sights on a legal and political balance: “to make for truth a level sway” (11). In the lines, “The fillet of my slavery/I tread beneath my steady feet”, Rose Terry Cooke reacts to the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment which gave African American males the right to vote in 1870, fifty years prior to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment which granted women the right to vote (13-14). Cooke wanted to elevate the status of women without leaning on the platform of men. She longed to see the collective strength of women, as the poem “Justice” reveals.

We can see the germinating seeds of collective strength in the poetry by African American women during the Harlem Renaissance. Georgia Douglas Johnson, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Jessie Redmon Fauset voiced the intimate concerns of African-American women. They and others like Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson were the first African American women to versify their intimate concerns and more specifically African-American female experiences concerning the social constraints of childbirth, motherhood, relationships with men, and the availability of social roles approximately thirty years prior to the start of the American Civil Rights Movement. In “Black Woman”, Georgia Douglas Johnson’s narrator pleads with an unborn “little child” to “be still” and “(d)on’t knock at my heart” (lines 1, 15, 9). In light of the “monster men/Inhabiting the earth,” the woman does not want to “give…birth” (lines 13-14, 16). In “Black Woman”, the reader hears the fear of a potential mother who lacks the freedom to choose her fate. Johnson communicates the sense of hopeless dread that results from living in the “alien cage” that has captured her culture and gender in “The Heart of a Woman” (6). For Johnson, the future progress of artistic achievement among African-American women depends upon freeing and awakening the heart that “tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars” (7).
In the poem “Dead Fires”, Jessie Redmon Fauset appears to shout about the hopelessness concerning progress. The complacent attitude concerning civil rights causes Fauset to view her time and place in history as a “gray calm” without the passion to agitate change (4).

Gwendolyn Bennett’s “Quatrains” furthers the feeling of physical limitations while revealing the expanse of creative desire: “Brushes and paints are all I have/To speak the music in my soul” (1-2). However, in “Quatrains”, Bennett discovers artistic expressions in common natural elements. She finds it “strange that grass should sing” and that snow offers a “swift surprise” (5, 7). While the momentum of creative and social change for African American women may be “slow” as the snow in Bennett’s poem, the genius of their contributions introduced an inspirational beauty into the poetic literary tradition.

A popular poet beginning in the first quarter of the 20th-century, Marianne Moore received nodding notoriety from many of her literary contemporaries like Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. In “Poetry”, Marianne Moore emphasizes and appreciates straight-forward language and imagery. Interested in scientific observation, she writes that people need to observe and learn about “the bat/holding on upside down…/…elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll(…)the base-/ball fan, the statistician” in order to fully appreciate each form of life (15-17, 20-21). Poetry requires the same deliberate appreciation. Moore writes “…we/do not admire what/we cannot understand” (13-15). She gives the reader the “raw” quest of discovering poetry as well as the “genuine” truth that is her inner self—a person intensely interested in both animals, as evidenced by her many visits to the Bronx Zoo, and sports, as her loyalty to the Yankees proves. In “The Fish”, her careful, detailed descriptions of “…ink-/besplattered jellyfish, crabs like green/lilies, and submarine/toadstools…” reveal that these forms of life suffer “All/external/marks of abuse…” such as “dynamite grooves, burns, and/hatchet strokes” (22-25, 26-28, 33-34). Published three years after World War I, Moore’s details of suffering in “The Fish” metaphorically reflect the human condition and highlight the destructive beauty of war upon the innocent. Not only does Moore mirror how modern warfare and cultural cruelty harms humankind, but more importantly she reminds us that the waves of change swell from the undercurrents of the past. Through Moore’s thoughtful observations, we see that the life forms under the sea, literally and symbolically beneath the surface, experience suffering as a result of mankind’s experiments and ignorance (i.e. “abuse”). Moore’s poetical attention to detail and direct honesty influenced future women writers like Elizabeth Bishop and Annie Dillard.

A direct description of social duplicity can also be discovered in the first wave of poetry created by Gwendolyn Brooks. In the poem “The Lovers of the Poor”, Gwendolyn Brooks illumines the differences between the white women, whom she titles “The Ladies”, and “The worthy poor” in a Chicago “Slum” (1, 24, 92). Her poem displays the dynamic social gap between the white women who “look,/In horror, behind a substantial citizeness/Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart./Who, arms akimbo, almost fills the door./All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor” (56-60). The black mother blends into her landscape of “The soil that stirs./The soil that looks the soil of centuries”, while “the Ladies” are “Keeping their scented bodies in the center/Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,/They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,/(…and)Try to avoid inhaling the laden air” (95-97, 100). To Brooks, “The Ladies” are not a part of this Chicago community, even if they live in a city with the same name. She names their city by listing wealthy suburbs, china patterns, clothing designers, and furniture. Published in 1981, “The Boy Died in My Alley” allegorizes a painful scene of universal disconnection, according to Brooks. Every boy involved in tragedy and violence could be “this Boy” who creates a “red floor” on the “alley” (16, 40). As a poet, Brooks represents the subtle difference between seeing and feeling. In her later poetry, she uplifts the vivid, detailed contrasts about race and place and impulsiveness in her poetry. As Kenny Jackson Williams points out in his essay, “Brooks’ Life and Career”, Gwendolyn Brooks chooses to uplift the creative endeavors of people in the Black community through her many workshops and group programs.

One of the first poets to include when discussing the initiation or stimulation of change whether socially, politically, or poetically should be Adrienne Rich. Often, she is labeled a lesbian poet, feminist, political poet, and Jewish poet; however, Rich writes a poetry that emphasizes her individual separateness and that communicates her ability to see the detailed needs of other people. She communicates the intimate mind, the questings of an individual through sexuality, poetry, race, lifestyle, and desire. In the first stanza of “Diving into the Wreck”, Adrienne Rich makes words and phrases describe not only a literal diver, but the poetic process. The poet reads “myths”, observes the details of life and the self with the “loaded…camera” of the eye, and finally carves out the details, raw moments, with “the edge of the knife-blade” that seems well-sharpened given that the poet “checked” it prior to adding “body-armor” along with “absurd flippers” and the “grave and awkward mask” (1-3, 5-7). In the final stanza of the poem, Adrienne Rich and the reader resurface along with the same images from the first stanza. She appears to communicate that an individual’s experiences contain mysteries that are the true poetry. And that in this instance, poetic experience does not contain the purpose of naming the poet just as the sea’s unbiased candor can only be heard in the waves. “Diving into the Wreck” along with other poems like “Yom Kippur 1984″ communicate Adrienne Rich’s search for the time “when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered,/tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude/in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted…” (84-86). Rich communicates a need to go beyond labels by valuing her personal “solitude.”

The women poets of the late 20th-century seem aware of an artistically transcendent, collective spirit. They use labels to emphasize creative individuality, the personal “I” narrative and feeling. This voice searches for unique similarities and differences, not hackneyed attempts to capture depth. However, their poetry often resists that voice in the process of telling others’ stories.

Sylvia Plath gives us the pain of the world, coupled with her inner turmoil, through her mysterious confessional poetry. However, her poetry does not stop the “I” in order to take up the “we” or “you.” The poem “Lady Lazarus” gives us the closest images to Plath: scenes of theatrical revival and death, a “shriek” and “ash”, the art of dying as a “miracle”, and the loneliness of being a blessed “valuable” (69, 72, 55, 6. She humorously dances with “death” in many of her poems. Plath’s poetry goes beyond the famous confessionals of personal, often violent, disturbances from her past and points to her tragic future.

Much of poetry seeks to heal alienation and cultural malaise by communicating the depths of the human spirit. We hear the lineage of the collective, narrative voice in Audre Lorde’s poem “Coal”. Audre Lorde tried to break down and overcome stereotypes about her race and sexual orientation. She was a black lesbian with parents whose heritage is from Carriacou Island in the Grenadines. She uses the Carriacou word “Zami” as a title for her biomythography and as “a new spelling of…(her) name.” The word “Zami” calls and conjures up a lineage of womens’ voices whose lifestyle of collective support is an expression of love and art. Audre Lorde places emphasis upon the self in every poem and in every genre. She defies poetic and prosaic forms in order to blend them. She challenges her place in every group while giving the group a place with her voice. With Barbara Smith, she began Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in order to help other women of color. She was a teacher, an activist to help women under apartheid in South Africa, and a stimulant for social change. Like the narrator of the poem “Coal”, Audre Lorde asserts her inner truth. The “I” is the void, the emptiness that is already full when she writes, “I/is the total black, being spoken/from the earth’s inside” (1-3). The earth speaks and claims us all as “I” and releases some of us to “know sun”, to become “young sparrows bursting from shell”, to transform into word “jewels in the open light” (16, 19, 25). Audre Lorde is an earth that gives birth to words, sentences, poems, and stories. She equates the depths and expanse of the earth with tender feelings: “Love is a word, another kind of open” (22). In “Love Poem”, Audre Lorde asks the earth to “(s)peak…and bless…(her) with what is richest” (1). By her descriptions, she makes love to the earth and “swing(s) out over the earth/over and over/again” (18-20). The earth as a metaphorical lover, as a poetic muse, can hold her and offers a density that can contain her desire “over and over again”. While Audre Lorde is known for agitating change by expressing her blackness, her homosexuality, and her feminism, she also creates change by expressing the yearning search for tenderness and love in her poetry and biomythology.

In her comments during the Second Sex Conference in New York on Sept. 29, 1979, (titled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”) Audre Lorde says, “Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.” Many might mock her combination of “difference” and “connection” as clever irony, and yet her comments transcend her time and place. A few paragraphs later, she adds, “In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.” American poetry has grown to embrace and encompass multi-cultural writers like Ai, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Leslie Marmon Silko as well as writers interested in other places and races of people like Carolyn Forchè and Carolyne Wright.

In her speech “Notes Towards a Politics of Location” delivered in Utrecht, Holland in June 1984, Adrienne Rich discusses how women can empower not only one another but our future selves: “The movement for change is a changing movement, changing itself, demasculinizing itself, de-Westernizing itself, becoming a critical mass that is saying in so many different voices, languages, gestures, actions: It must change; we ourselves can change it. We who are not the same. We who are many and do not want to be the same” (76-77).

In April 2008, National Poetry Month, as if a month could contain the words and phrases that make women bold, sensual, powerful, tender, intimate, and aware—the list of poetic preservation stretches into the long ago scene—the clothes of Shakespeare’s sister enshrined and rotting, alongside the child slaves’ hand-stitched, shrinking, single dress crafted from feed sacks, the ironed Quaker pleats and draping moth-eaten shawls of New England, the sudden Versace, embellished sari, a tailored dashiki, T-length dress hiked her skirt to a mini and pressed palms into pants, slack knickers, until we reach the intricate nakedness of women’s poetry at the end of the 20th-century. But what measure of women and ourselves has learned the lesson, that Audre Lorde states in her dismantling, during this new century with its different wars and abuses, same hopes and charities, and greater “knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives”³?

Do we truly empower one another as different women after all of this defining? I know that our poetry has and does, and that as women we will continue to push beyond the boundaries of limitation.

Technorati Tags: National Poetry Month, social change, women poets

Anna Brigadere (1861-1933)

Biancamaria Frabotta: Pushing Boundaries

by Shannon K. Winston

Biancamaria Frabotta is one of the most politically engaged poets in Italy today. She has been at the forefront of the woman’s movement in Italy and, as previously mentioned, she has written extensively about the polemics surrounding the category of an exclusively “women’s literature.” In the 1980s, she was the editor of a feminist review entitled “Orsa minore” and in the early 1990s she also edited a review called “Poesia.” In addition to her numerous poetry collections, she has also written a book and several plays. Frabotta teaches contemporary Italian literature at the University “La Sapienza.”

Frabotta’s creative and academic work reflects her commitment to gender studies and women’s rights. In “Frabotta’s Elegies: Theory and Practice,” Keala Jewell highlights the fact that questions of sexuality lie at the core of Frabotta’s work: “In Frabotta’s own verse we find a fascination with ambiguous creatures and doublings. A number of poems evoke the theme of twins (Frabotta’s astrological sign) or an “ambidextrous” self torn between two identities” (Jewell, “Frabotta’s Elegies: Theory and Practice,” 179). Jewell cities octopi and jellyfish as animals that inspire Frabotta precisely because they are not animals that typically inspire poetry. These animals serve as “new “others” against which the lyric self comes to the fore in a series of analogies and differentiations” (Ibid).

Much of Frabotta’s poetry grapples with many of the same themes that psychoanalysis attempts to understand, namely the complexity of the subject and his/her position of in the world. Themes of doubling, otherness, and difference are central to Frabotta’s writing. However, to reiterate Jewell’s point, Frabotta does so from unusual and new perspectives. For example, in the poem “The White Rumor,” the speaker begins: “The apple teaches me that it doubles it itself. / Life teaches me that it is apple seeds/ the half of a growing circumstance/ the mirror that doubles the head of a good hope” (1-4). Here, Frabotta finds quotidian objects—the conventional image of the mirror and the less commonly invoked apple—to explore issues of doubling and identity, which she uncovers in all facets of life. Frabotta’s poetry is demanding and, often times, hard to penetrate. The reader must be patient and use his/her analytical skills to uncover the meaning(s).

Frabotta’s poetry not only challenges conceptions of gender with her choice of subject matter, but also in the generic forms that she uses. In fact, Jewell’s principal argument in her article is that Frabotta uses the elegy—a traditionally male form—and reclaims it with her own feminist perspectives. Frabotta is, therefore, a writer who continually pushes the boundaries in her work in order to arrive at a greater sense of equality and to gain a deeper understanding of herself and others.

Sisters in the Dark

by Mary Anne Zammit

Gender violence is a challenging problem affecting all societies, and the trafficking of women by international crime organizations is one form of violence that has been kept in the dark. It is quickly becoming one of the biggest challenges in the western world, yet the international community is largely unaware of this violent crime against women - violence that violates Human Rights and destroys victims’ lives.

Economic globalization has increased the trafficking of women from poorer countries to wealthier countries. The trafficking is done legally or illegally, and in most cases the women find themselves in forced work and into prostitution. The United Nations estimates that around 4 million people are being trafficked each year globally, amounting to large profits to criminal groups. About 700,000 to 2 million of those are women according to one rough estimate by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. In the United States it is estimated that as many as 50,000 women and children arrive each year, forced to work as prostitutes, servants, and laborers, most likely under the threat of violence carried out by crime rings. The trafficking of women especially for prostitution is becoming a serious problem for many developing countries.

The lack of opportunities and poor conditions in the women’s respective countries caused by increased corporate globalization and privatization compel them to leave their homes with hopes of finding better jobs. The poverty of women has increased since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the economic transition in Central Europe and Eastern Europe prompting many women to migrate for work in Western Europe. These women turn to all resources, including adverts in the newspapers, and accept positions as maids, factory workers, and dancers - which all promise a better life. But promises are not kept. What appears to be a proper job application and contract with a legitimate employer turns out to be an introduction to the sex industry, in which women find themselves sold for prostitution. Such is the case of Olga, a twenty-five-year old woman from Ukraine.

One day in search Olga read an advertisement for a job in Greece as a shop assistant. This adventurous prospect appealed to her so she applied for the position. All was arranged and Olga s’ hopes for a better life were heightened until she started her adventure. A perilous adventure was what awaited her. That day she was supposed to travel there were other women who met the organizers who transported them across a river. Instead of Greece, Olga found herself in Bosnia and with the other women. The women were transported from one car to the other crossing unknown territories until they arrived at a club. Soon after the women were sold and forced into prostitution and if they did not cooperate they would be sold again to more dangerous owners. They were not only being kept in filthy rooms with inadequate facilities, but were exposed to sexually transmitted diseases and grave injuries. The IOM (International Organization of Migration) have reported about 420,000 women trafficked from Ukraine in recent years, so Olga’s story of abuse by human traffickers is one that is becoming too common in her country.

In this sisterhood of forced sex workers from Ukraine, violence and deplorable conditions have dimmed hopes for economic prosperity. Unknowingly, women like Olga ended up as victims of trafficking and going unwillingly into the sex industry because of the threat – and execution – of violence. And there are other stories, of women who knew from the start they were going to work in the sex industry as dancers in nightclubs or as prostitutes. Yet, since these women may have entered illegally in the countries, they were enslaved to their traffickers, afraid of turning to local authorities or INTERPOL, the International Criminal Police Organization. Women sex workers have also been exposed to violence and substandard living conditions against their will - human rights violations.

Prostitution and trafficking in women violates women’s rights and should be stopped. With the help of and international development organizations like UNFPA, and NGOs (Non-governmental organizations) like the Global Fund for Women, the women most likely to become victims of human trafficking are achieving more autonomy and empowerment. INTERPOL is also working very hard to combat this criminal activity following the guidelines for law enforcement. These actions include:

a) The exchange of information between states in order to establish whether individuals crossing or attempting to cross an international border with travel documents belonging to other persons.

b) The type of travel document that individuals have used.

c) The terms and methods used by organized criminal camps for the purpose of trafficking.

d) The transportation of victims, routes and links.

We cannot tolerate any form of gender violence. Human trafficking of our sisters is another abuse that must come to light, and those who create the darkness should be penalized.

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